Whenever I return from a vacation, I feel eager to start a fresh panel. ( I don’t use canvas) We just returned from our fourth trip to Martinique and I was so psyched I finished this little 8 x 10 in a single day. Well, that’s a little bit of a fudge. I don’t count blocking out basic shapes and toning the panel but the truth is that is usually just a half hour task, as important as it is. Painting directly into white makes the job too hard. This will be my 4th painting of Martinique but my first in 2018.

I have the tools, but not the patience (or, dare I say it?) time left to cultivate true bonsai. Maybe none of us has. However I must concede that Jade Plant gives us the option of faking it because of the gnarled and easily manipulated trunks on even the youngest plants. Still, painting a bonsai takes less time and discipline. What’s more, any damage resulting from my less-than-green thumb is already done.

Early on, I learned that painting anything “white” should never mean squeezing out a dollop of paint from a tube of flake white, or titanium white and going to town. Some day I’ll have the courage to challenge that rule in a landscape or figurative painting (I’m sure I could pull it off in an abstract work) but not today. For now it is too much fun creating the illusion of snow using reds, blues, greens and even black. This little 9 x 12 winter scene involved the whole color wheel and was a joy to do. The hardest part was choosing the mixtures that contrasted snow with water.

This is the season when galleries everywhere feature small, affordable art for the Christmas season. Not only is art a unique gift but it’s value cannot be googled and it is really easy to wrap! Win, win, win…. Two of these are just 5×5 with a painted 1.5″ cradle and the floral field is still accessible at 10 x 10

This month I have strayed a bit from my usual small format panels and completed an 18 x 24 landscape which I then highlighted with some careful scribbling in graphite. Normally, I continue my images on the top and sides of my panels and coat the images in resin. This time, my plan is to frame. Because I am concerned that a resin coating might fight the effect of the frame, I am deciding to leave this one au naturale

Next, I went back into small format for a little landscape which I think prefer to show unframed. Still I don’t think I can resist a shiny coating on this one. It will pop.

This week, I’ve switched back and forth between two projects that represent the yin and yang of my artistic impulses. The portrait of my niece, Dana has kept me fixated on the most minor tone changes and drawing details that tease but will never satisfy my puzzle-craving nature. For respite, I dove into this larger but much more freeing landscape. The portrait is a little 9 x 12 number that has tested my vision and minusule brush control and has absorbed a large part of many days while the larger 12 x 16 landscape called for larger brushes bolder gambles. I’ll wait another day to decide what changes remain and when I will relieve myself the temptation to go back in by pouring the final resin coating on each. Whatever happens, it has been fun!

For the last three years my work has been exclusively collage. Recently, though, I have focused more closely on my old love of landscape with the result that the collage aspect of those paintings has been limited to foreground grasses which do tend to add an element of depth and perspective by creating for the viewer the illusion that he o she is in close proximity to the image looking far into the distance.

Depending on the nature of the scene, however, and the size of the piece I am finding that adding plants is not a requirement to achieve the desired result. Hence my last three small works (the largest is 6″ x 6″)

While I have no intention of abandoning my work in collage, I did enjoy allowing the paintings to stand on their own.

Suddenly, the signs of spring I have been looking for. Yes, the snow is melting and the days are longer but more importantly, Im feeling the energy that flows when my email starts filling up with show invitations. Today I had my first meeting with the president of the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery of Westerly which I was recently juried into. Their next scheduled show is themed “Views from the Street” so my landscapes will work there.

Meanwhile my daughter, Shelley who is a talented photographer with a studio at a nearby converted velvet mill, has invited me to join her for a pop up show at her studio in two weeks. She has chosen some of my abstract botanials for that.

Finally, I plan to introduce a new series of abstract paintings featuring various sizes of metal washers (no plants) and want to produce enough pieces for a meaningful launch of the series at the spring shows.

That means multi-tasking. This week, these are three of five pieces that are in the middle of the process of soaking up their resin baths. By the time they are cured and ready to show, I hope to have many more of all three series waiting for their resin treatments as well. Somehow I’ll have to make time to produce more plants, but with a good foot or more of snow still on the ground, I’m guessing I have some leeway there.